My Top 10 Video Games of All Time: #10

At the end of my third article discussing why gaming is leaving me behind, I promised to make a list of my top 10 games to show that I am not bitter toward gaming itself. I full-heartedly believe video games can be an art form regardless of what critics say and my list contains a number of gaming’s greatest masterpieces. A thing to remember about this list is that it is a record of my personal favorites and not a list of the objectively greatest games of all time. If you disagree then that’s fine with me, we all have different tastes.  So, I invite you to sit back, relax, put on your Power Glove and Mind Link (little known Atari reference for the uninitiated), and get ready for a discussion of some of my favorite video games of all time…

Just for your information, all of these articles may contain spoilers…

10. Final Fantasy VIII

This choice might cause some contention among gamers because opinion favors Final Fantasy VII as the greatest game in the series; however, I don’t agree. It’s not that I don’t like VII; I think the game is amazing. It’s just that VIII was my introduction into the series and a darn good one at that. Squall Leonhart was the kind of dark, brooding, and inexplicably coat-wearing hero that appealed to my 14 year old mind. It didn’t hurt that he had one of the coolest and most impractical weapons ever devised in fiction, the gun blade. I can’t imagine that sword being very comfortable to hold. 

So, other than VIII grabbing my attention first, what else makes this a better game than Final Fantasy VII? First of all, the Junction system was better than the Materia system. I can see some of you shaking your heads right now, “Who wants to be drawing Thundara out of a giant bee for 30 minutes?” Well, I get your point, but I still believe the junction system required much more strategy because in order to stay at maximum stats you would have to preserve your different abilities. For example, if you attached 100 meteors to the Lion Heart (sword) to give it maximum damage potential, then you were smart not to use too much and figure out another way to beat an enemy. 

The second reason that VIII was better than VII was that the hero was cooler than the villains. The villains of the game were a punk doppelganger and a time traveling sorceress. The latter game went through great pains to make Sephiroth the most awesome video game character ever and gamers ate it up. However, my Christian proclivities never gravitated toward the bad guy and I was a bit turned off by VII in that way.

Last, while VII was very light on the love story elements, which were implied more than shown, VII hammered the point home with a love story fit for a gaming teenage boy. This love story, however shallow and adolescent it was, helped us feel like we were playing a more mature and adult game compared to its predecessor.     

Foot Place Self Directly In Mouth Featuring Pat Robertson

It's amazing that Pat Robertson has made it twice on my site in reference to things Christian leaders should never say. His rant went something like this:

Here, Robertson is attacking Ken Ham, the Creationist who just debated Bill Nye, about his belief in Young Earth Creationism (YEC). While I might have my own disagreements with Ham on the subject, though I would agree that macro-evolution is not real scientific inquiry, the last thing Pat Robertson should be doing is attacking him on such a huge platform. Interestingly, instead of taking issue with Bill Nye's comments mocking the Biblical Flood or asserting that the Bible is not a historically accurate account of the world, Robertson decides to attack Ham and his view of Creation.

Never mind the fact that Robertson's argument is filled with mistakes and ridiculous assumptions, the real issue is his willingness to give so much ammunition to our common enemies. His comments are already making the triumphant rounds through secular circles (you can see the disgusting truth here, here, and here). It's funny that these secularists will decry Pat on his views of homosexuality but will praise him in his assessment of evolution. Is Pat Robertson so naive to think that his comments wouldn't be interpreted in this fashion?

Unity is needed in the Church today, but all Pat Robertson has done is encourage more division by attacking a whole movement of Christianity.    

Trial-And-Error: Unthinking Process or Argument for Intelligence?

For my 100th post, I decided to finally finish something I've been working on for some time.

Trial-and-error is the process by which naturalistic evolution, or as The Free Dictionary puts it, “Change in the genetic composition of a population during successive generations, as a result of natural selection acting on the genetic variation among individuals, and resulting in the development of new species,” is advanced. This is an idea Carl Sagan wrote about when discussing fossils, “The fossil record implies trial and error, the inability to anticipate the future, features inconsistent with a Great Designer (though not a Designer of a more remote and indirect temperament.)” Trial-and-error in evolutionary process is also supported by sites like What Is Life, who state, “Evolution works because it produces change through trial and error.” So, with so many Evolutionists and resources touting trial-and-error as natural selection’s mechanism, then why even question the contrary?

First we must ask the question, “What exactly constitutes trial-and-error?” The term is defined by Dictionary.com as “experimentation or investigation in which various methods or means are tried and faulty ones eliminated in order to find the correct solution or to achieve the desired result or effect.” Really, how else would evolution be able to work as it “finds” out which biological arrangements are going to work in the genetic scheme of things and which arrangements just won’t stand a chance? However, I believe the more time one spends thinking about this evolutionary process, the more it doesn’t make atheistic sense. Have you ever just sat down and thought about how complicated biological trial-and-error would be?

While doing research for this article I came upon a question in Yahoo! Answers about the lack of trial-and-error evidence in the fossil record. One of the answers was priceless as it explained that trial-and-error change involves very small changes such as slightly higher levels of hemoglobin. For those who don’t know, hemoglobin is a protein found in the red blood cells which carry oxygen throughout the body using the blood stream. Now, this got me thinking about what it would take to actually evolve hemoglobin to the levels we find today in the human body.

Let’s start with the normal concentration of hemoglobin in the blood of the average human at birth. According to Medscape, the normal concentration is a mean of 16.5 g/dL with a range of 14-24 g/dL. When the hemoglobin concentration starts deviating from the normal range, health problems start to occur. According to Medscape, a low hemoglobin level is categorized as anemia. As the concentration decreases to critical levels, the person is susceptible to congestive heart failure, myocardial infarction (heart attack), and stroke (Hemoglobin Test, 2011). High hemoglobin concentration is often a product of polycythemia (high volume of red blood cells in the blood) and is just as dangerous as anemia because the condition can lead to thrombosis (spontaneous clotting), congenital heart conditions, and stroke (Besa, 2012). Every one of these disease processes is lethal without the intervention of modern medical therapies.  

So, let’s explore the process by which the correct levels of hemoglobin in the human body were determined by evolutionary processes. There are many articles upon review which describe aspects of the evolution of hemoglobin (like this one); however, a literature review using the phrase hemoglobin and trial and error yielded no such description of the trial and error process in relation to hemoglobin. Thus, we must critically think about how such a process would work in reference to trial-and-error. 

Obviously, it would have initially involved a wide range of hemoglobin levels within different hominids or else not enough hominids would have survived the process and this current conversation could not even happen. This process should be fairly simple because the early humans who exhibited anemic or extremely high levels would just die out and leave those within the correct levels alive. This is where we run into trouble. How did natural selection determine that outlying levels of hemoglobin killed these organisms? Evolution from single-celled organisms to what we have today is a process that is said to have occurred over 4 billion years and, therefore, many millions of biologic processes, structures, and mechanism had to be evolving at the same time. Within the same time frame that natural selection is determining the correct levels of hemoglobin in the blood, it might be determining correct hormonal balances, the correct steps of clotting cascade, or any of the other billions of essential mechanisms inside an organism. 

Another problem arises from this inquiry, millions upon millions of biologic mechanisms within the cells and tissues must work correctly just to keep us alive.  At all times, cells are constantly transporting sodium and potassium ions across their membranes using Sodium-Potassium ATPase pumps to maintain resting potential. This process allows our cells to react to changes in the environment, to communicate with other cells, and to help keep cells working. Membrane potential is an essential part of the transportation of neurotransmitters and hormones throughout the body which are used for everything from temperature regulation to energy consumption. An example would be Insulin which is an essential hormone that regulates glucose levels and diabetics can tell you all about its biologic necessity. 

The point of all this scientific jargon is to show that hemoglobin would not have been the only thing being fine-tuned at the time of its development in hominids. Natural selection would have had to single out hemoglobin out of all the other developing biomechanics to determine inadequate levels as the culprit for an organism’s death. That would be highly suspect because human intelligence would be hard-pressed to figure this out let alone an unthinking process such as natural selection. 

Let’s say then that natural selection did indeed determine that inadequate hemoglobin levels killed the organism. We now have a problem with sample size. Any researcher knows that sample size is the key for any experimental trial to determine statistical significance. Sakpal (2010) demonstrates that small sample size can lead to under-estimation and result in a lack of statistical significance.

With all of these processes developing in an organism at one time, the rate of death would have to be extremely high while natural selection is fine-tuning. Thus, with the millions of ways one can die from the failure of compensatory mechanisms, how could the sample size for human evolution ever be large enough? Millions of factors means that millions or even billions of subjects have to be alive at one time and even with these numbers, the sample size of viable organisms would be relatively small leading to statistical insignificance. In the biological selection process, statistical insignificance would prevent natural selection from determining with any certainty the correct hemoglobin range. 

Evolution and natural selection are solid until one has to really think about the difficult questions. Inquiries into the process of trial-and-error which superficially seems like a slam dunk for the theory actually can destroy it. Can evolution really be explained by an unthinking trial-and-error process or is intelligence inherent in the intricacies of biology? In light of the arguments posited in this article, the latter idea makes much more sense.    

References:

Besa, E.C. (2012). Polycythemia Vera. Medscape. Retrieved from http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/205114-overview.

Mayo Clinic. (2011). Hemoglobin Test. Retrieved from http://www.mayoclinic.org/tests-procedures/hemoglobin-test/basics/definition/prc-20015022.

Merritt, B.Y. (2012). Hemoglobin concentration. Medscape. Retrieved from http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/2085614-overview#aw2aab6b3.  

Sakpal, T.V. (2010). Sample Size estimation in clinical trial. Perspectives in Clinical Research, 1(2), 67-69.

  

                    

Why Gaming is Leaving Me Behind. Part 3.

Here is Part 1.

Here is Part 2.

 

Now presenting the third and final chapter of what I find unappealing in the current gaming climate...

The Politics. I am a Right Wing kind of guy and you might be wondering why I would be so disappointed with the myriad of military shooters out there which should be to my liking. Well, unlike most modern players who seem to buy games only for the multiplayer aspect, I actually like to play through the game’s plot. One of the worst experiences I had playing through a game’s story was Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. The first game’s plot was not very memorable and the only thing I can remember is the main character dying in a nuclear blast. 

The game in question, however, is memorable for all of the wrong reasons. The game starts out with the mission No Russian which I had no problem with because, like any 1980s action movie, it seemed to be setting up the terrorist villain as a horrible person that you can’t wait to kill. But, was he the final boss? No! The final boss (spoilers) was an American general who betrayed the team. The whole last mission has the player mowing through American black ops. This kind of story telling is aggravating and shows how much regard Infinity Ward (an American developer, I might add) really has for the United States. No matter how gung-ho American the developer makes their future games, I will always feel a certain falseness behind it all.

I might sound like a prude or what not, but these complaints are not from an anti-game crusader like the ridiculous Jack Thompson, they are from a genuine gamer. I have  witnessed an activity that used to be fun and exciting become a cesspool of depravity, cheating, and repelling. I want to thank the general public for ruining yet another thing I enjoy.

   

Although my current attitude seems to be totally anti-gaming, I still have total respect for the medium and the people who craft some interesting and vast worlds. I also can't wait for some titles to be released. When Halo 5 comes around, you can bet I will be purchasing an Xbox One. In honor of video games, I am going to count down my top 10 video games.                        

Putting God Back Into the Equation

As students of the Word of God, we receive many disparaging remarks about our precious Holy Bible. I can’t tell you how many times individuals have approached me, telling me how man alone wrote the Bible and use the fact that there are countless extraneous books left out to fit an agenda of modern Christianity. The Gospel of Judas, Thomas, Mary Magdalene, Jehoiakim, or whatever person is the flavor of the week in scholarly circles, are constantly brought up as being withheld from apocrypha. Academically, the argument against many of these works can be found in Gnosticism from the mid to late second century, Saint Jerome, or any other historical points. However, one place from which we never seem to argue is that of God’s involvement in dispersion of His Word. All too often, God is taken out of the Biblical equation altogether.

For the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man: but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost. -2 Peter 1:21 

So, according to His own Word, God is responsible for telling His men what to write. If this is the case, why isn’t God brought up in more Biblical authorship debates? I think many times we humans think on a solely physical plane and can sometimes forget about God’s point of view. Arguing from the perspective that God has decided what books should stay and go in His own Word, might seem like a counterproductive argument against atheistic sentiments. This perspective is not counterproductive because atheists and agnostics argue from purely naturalistic and humanistic positions. Why can’t we as children of the ultimate spiritual Force in the universe argue from spiritual perspectives? Let’s stop taking God out of the equation.